2021-03-01 at 00:25:48
Éva Szabó from PhD student
will present All by Herself: Spinster Homes in Barbara Pym’s Less than Angels
Abstract
All by Herself: Spinster Homes in Barbara Pym’s Less than Angels Single women characters reoccur in cultural texts, including Bridget Jones, Miss Jean Brodie or Miss Havisham. In Spinster Kate Bolick points out that traditionally “the single woman is nearly always considered an anomaly, an aberration from the social order” (23), reclaiming the word “spinster”, however, arguing that spinsterhood entails a sense of independence and self-sufficiency even coupled women should preserve (251).
Barbara Pym’s novels represent similar spinsters who refuse to be sighing old maids desperately looking for husbands or romance, the image so deeply ingrained in stereotypes. Less than Angels (1955) features such heroines whose home-making, a female virtue, exists without the male recipient, going against societal norms. My paper will investigate how these women create a single household and in what ways spinsterhood provides a mode of silent resistance towards societal expectations, acting as a subversive attempt at regaining control over their lives in the face of heteronormative order.
In section
British and Commonwealth Literature